July Meeting – Luke Dicken on AI

This month’s Boston Post Mortem is next week, TUESDAY, July 17th at 7pm at The Skellig in Waltham.

We are featuring a talk by Luke Dicken of Robot Overlord Games, the University of Strathclyde and IGDA Scotland:

“More Than Soldiers and Aliens – AI for the Next Generation”

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often used in games to talk about the enemies that the player will face. “The AI did such-and-such” is frequently heard when gamers get together, but as AI techniques have matured, they are no longer restricted to being a couple of algorithms thrown into a game to make the enemy soldiers shoot back.

Instead, AI now has a major role in driving the games we play and managing the overall experience. AI systems can control the flow of the game, where the enemies come from, the art assets we encounter and even the quests that we will experience. In this lecture, Luke will cover some of these non-standard applications of AI techniques, highlighting why these approaches are important from a game development point of view, and how they can be implemented.

Speaker bio: Luke Dicken is the founder of Robot Overlord Games as well as a researcher with the Strathclyde AI and Games group at University of Strathclyde. He is a contributor to AltDevBlogADay.com, one of the principal organisers for the AltDev Conferences, a Director of IGDAIGDA Artificial Inteligence SIG.

This month’s meeting is generously sponsored by EDGE Technology Services, who in addition to having open positions in the area, will be providing drink tickets.

EDGE Technology Services, founded in 2000, is a privately held company whom possesses deep domain expertise and has a credible reputation for securing high-quality industry experts for business, software, and IT projects in an expedient, efficient, and professional manner. They partner with their clients, both nationally and internationally, to provide resources in the form of consulting, project management, or via staff augmentation – temporary or permanent.